Maps and Graphics

Some Explanatory Notes:

Due to limited capacity to store files on the site at some point
in the past I removed
files that I had here but never got around to fixing links, etc. This
page is kinda in the process of being reorganized as a result, but I'm in no
hurry to do anything with it at present. If you have any interest in
the CC files for any of what you see here but there's no link (or it's broken) just shoot me an email and I'll send
it along. Meanwhile, when people request stuff I'll put it up on dropbox and
eventually
link back to them here.

Any files mentioned here are of my
own creation except where specifically noted, though they may use CC symbols from
here and there. For example, at one point I was using a thingy for Harn
maps, mostly because it had some commands for random tree placement.
However, it used a custom color palette. Well I no longer have that mod or
the associated palette so the maps that I had made with it all had to be
revised to deal with a lot of symbols in shades of nightmare
pink. Another reason to have removed things for download - because it
provides me motivation to actually update and improve stuff.

I am using CC3 but a lot of things I've done were originated in earlier versions. They
may have used its various official add-ons, including City Designer, Dungeon Designer,
etc. They are also frequently based on work done by others in other media.
Unless I've specifically stated that something is all mine, any drawings here
should not be taken as a claim of authorship by me.
Of course, by putting them here I fully anticipate and expect that people will download
them and do whatever they want with them - I am making MY efforts
publicly available. Feel free to redistribute anything found here as you like, but naturally I would ask
that credit be given where it's due especially since - as noted - that doesn't always belong to me. I have on a very few occasions used custom symbols when
finding a need for them and every time I do I have to relearn how to go about
making them. I have occasionally used some symbols from the (now rather old)
Forgotten Realms Interactive Atlas too, but by and large everything is done "out
of the box" from the most recent version of Campaign Cartographer.

These works may cover a quite broad range of my efforts and may be very old. For various reasons these are simply the ones that I've chosen to make public and
available. I have hesitated making available certain maps that I've drawn because they
might theoretically put
intellectual property (which sometimes belongs to understandably tetchy people) into publicly available areas that I haven't felt comfortable with
doing. I AM reasonably comfortable enough with public display of whatever's here.
Some stuff that I've based these works on I have seen available as free downloads;
some I've seen versions of posted on other forums; sometimes the product is just
decades
out of print and no one is in danger of losing money as a
result of it being here. Aside from all that, none of my own work here will
actually
fully replace
having ALL the original material - you can't really run Tegel Manor
or CSIO with what I have here - you still need a copy of the original
key texts or
their updates. You can, of course, run them with MY maps instead of the
originals allowing you to keep the valuable originals in better condition, or
replace crumbling or lost maps.

The thumbnails and associated .png files are mostly just to
provide visitors here with an idea of what the actual Campaign Cartographer file
contains. The .png's generally don't do full justice to the
output of the actual file but I don't care to clog up my limited web space with
graphic files any larger than necessary (and even so I repeatedly hit my
pathetically low limits and can only keep what's most useful/popular here).

Though I currently use CC3 I don't use it to its intended
potential. Almost nothing I do with it can't be done with earlier versions
and files are likely to be backward compatible. If they are NOT and you are
having any problems in viewing, printing, or working with them send me an email
and I'll do what I can, or go to the community forums at
http://forum.profantasy.com/ where
there are VASTLY more skilled and knowledgeable people to assist you.
Mostly, however, that's just going to be your problem to solve.

For the Combat Computer, although things are arranged slightly different (better, actually) it
is functionally identical to the one seen in Dragon issue #74. This should
print out much more legibly than the pdf from the Dragon Archive CD or copies
made from copies of conversions found on the net. Of course the CC file
is here for you to muck about with as desired. Maybe someone can load it
to CC3 and add graphical bells and whistles. This is
really intended for functionality so it isn't fancied up. It's
something you can give copies of to
all your players to use and abuse, and then just print new ones when they wear
out. The weapon vs. armor adjustment numbers are small and thus
possibly hard to read for us older folks (and I don't use them myself anyway), but I've made them about as large as
I can and still fit.

Print it out on the best cardstock your
printer can handle, or glue the two printed sheets to decently stiff
cardboard. Cut out the two discs - note that the upper disc has an outer
line the same diameter as the lower disc in order to ensure that it prints
correctly, but when cutting it out it should be cut to the inner line with the
square "Target AC" window. The outer
ring of large numbers on the lower disc should all be visible once the two discs
are connected, while the inner ring of large numbers should only show one at a
time in the "Target AC" window. Cut out the four long, thin windows in the
middle of the upper disc too (Xacto knife or razor knife - use caution). Connect the two discs with whatever method
you can find that works at allowing the two discs to turn on the same axis.

If you really need instructions for how to
use it you obviously haven't played enough 1st Edition and you shouldn't be
messing about with such complex tools as this - you might hurt yourself. Turn the two discs until the AC of the target shows in the window. Find
the curved, colored band on the upper disc that corresponds to the class of the attacker.
Find the column section on the band that includes the attackers level (or hit
dice for monsters). Follow that column out to the outermost edge and read the number required to hit
in the same column
off of the
lower disc.
Or just throw the disc away and look it all up in the DMG. :)

Note that common sense must be used here because unlike the Dragon
magazine version, this
computer allows for AC's below -10. When selecting a very low (negative)
AC and then trying to look up what a very low level PC will need to hit it the
results will appear to be quite wonky. The extreme negative AC's ARE
allowed by the rules and DO work when referencing to-hit numbers for higher
level PC's, but you have to understand that you can go "off the chart" with this
calculator, meaning that it correctly extends the to-hit charts for high
negative AC's but when you then try to read those results for very low level
characters you're "off the chart".

Like the original calculator this includes
weapon vs. armor adjustments. The weapons listed in red are the
adjustments for missile fire. Weapon-vs-AC adjustments will ONLY be accurate when turning the
discs to select an AC between 10 and 2, because obviously you're actually
selecting the corresponding armor TYPE at that point, not actual armor CLASS.

The Saving Throw Computer is really
straightforward. If you can't figure out how to use it you have issues
that only institutionalization can deal with. In a way it's much
less useful or necessary than the combat computer because it only handles one
chart - but if nothing else it's easier to READ than that one chart from the DMG
and it's a natural companion to the combat computer.

I tried to take great care that these would
provide correct information, but if you use it and should find any errors
do please let me know so that I can fix them. By the way, I made a version
for 2nd Edition as well and have now actually made the 1E version at least a
LITTLE more graphically interesting.

I was once
contemplating running a Star Trek-based RPG of some kind. I never did,
but I nonetheless set about drawing the Enterprise from the original series in
CC2 (!) based on my old Franz Joseph Designs (FJD) blueprints. I discovered that
those old blueprints had a number of problems both technically and creatively and my searches on
the web for solutions only turned up more. Though virtually nobody else
would have noticed or cared I couldn't bring myself to just copy the old
blueprints and live with knowing they didn't actually FIT. To simplify the job for myself I decided to draw a smaller
variety of Federation vessel giving me justification for things not matching up
to the Enterprise. I made significant progress though I still didn't have
the details I wanted. I thought of
using the 1701-A Enterprise instead, but after drawing a traced top-view of the
1701-A I grew tired of the project. I set it all aside but posted my top view
of the 1701-A here for a while. Anyway,
I eventually got hit with the bug again. I first went back to my Federation
"destroyer", but in doing yet more research I actually found what I had been
seeking for a couple of years - an ACCURATE drawing of the original
Enterprise model.

It was not just scans of drawings or even detailed photos - this was in a
CAD format that I could import to CC! Of course, after importing to CC I
found that a fair amount of work still had to be done to the converted file to
clean it up, fix a number of issues, and in general make it more presentable for
CC. After some monkeying around I now have a terrific rendition of the
entire Enterprise exterior. There might still be some tiny, nagging details
that only detailed photos of the model will resolve for me but I'm really happy
with this.

Once upon a time I had a LOT of work completed on deck
plans. Somehow, somewhere I've LOST THEM ALL. I started that project again
(though not in earnest) but I have done the bridge
in great detail. I will likely tinker with deck plans as the rare mood strikes me, but as the FJD blueprints are hopelessly
non-canon I'm left with a great deal of adaptation work. My original goal
of matching FJD interiors to the exteriors that you see here is a non-starter.
It is an impossibility because the portholes are simply not spaced vertically
to allow even extreme convolutions of FJD deck configurations and still make some
kind of sense. My revised goal is adapting the FJD deck plans to be a more
correct representation that at least fits the original hull - essentially reverse-engineering the refit that would
have created the 1701-A. One of the major issues is then fitting the Main
Engineering spaces into the secondary hull as it should have been.

Again, I can't take full credit
for this, as it IS based directly and heavily upon someone else's work.
Someone who it appears had access to
(or detailed measurements of) the restored original-filming Smithsonian model.
Had I the research
resources I wanted I'd have gotten here eventually on my own but I wonder if
would ever have looked this good.

Oh, you may
be wondering why it's "green". Well, I wanted to have some color
for it to stand out on a white screen and the original filming model actually
had a
significant green tinge, it just got washed out by the studio lights when
filming and gave it a generally gray appearance. The original model was also painted with
heavy weathering which similarly did not get seen by the cameras of the
time. This
drawing is mostly based on the original filming miniature, but with a few
changes to reflect the miniatures' current state as displayed in the
Smithsonian (it's been through a couple of restorations - including restorations
to FIX errors of earlier restoration), as well as the CGI rendition made for the HD
effects-revisions of the
original series episodes. Unless you're an EXTREME Trek geek or highly dedicated
modeler you certainly wouldn't know the differences even if you saw them. In any
case the colors are just there for the sake of color itself; making the drawings easier
on the eye. If the color bothers you,
change it yourself since that's what I put it here for.

This, I believe, is Version 5 and I no longer remember what I've
changed. The biggest change from the
previous version I had here (3.2) is that it uses a more sensible color scheme.
At some point I was using a lot of macros and such that I'd downloaded that used
a custom color palette. Well, in upgrading to CC3 I lost the various tools
and also the palette and now all those files (mostly my old Judges Guild maps)
had pink trees and other weird colors and I had to go back and edit them all
(which is how this version jumped from v3.2, which had been a tinkering version
with various corrections and so forth, to v5).
This drawing is a translation of the original map and was done
almost entirely by
measurement of the original rather than tracing over a bitmap. I started out
attempting a
trace-over, but since the original map was very orthogonal I realized measuring was
actually easier than trying to constantly adjust to distorted scans. It
turned out very well with very little needing to be fudged from the original map, and most
of the fudging is so minor as to be nearly irrelevant. You'd probably be
hard-pressed to even FIND where I've deviated from the original. In fact,
in some areas I've fixed problems like rooms/buildings with no doors.
My method for the JG maps is to draw a "wireframe" of all the
structures and major elements and then proceed from there to add color and
details. The CSIO has unusual "architecture"
where city blocks are strangely, inexplicably interconnected buildings,
stairs, rooms, and even what seem to be isolated alleys or roads in the interior of a city block.
A city that wants to be laid out like an old-school dungeon.
I hit upon the coded, multi-color idea when I put this
one aside after some initial disappointments to start another city project - TSR's Rock of Bral map for Spelljammer.
That map used a technique of having perhaps a half-dozen colors used for
buildings. Although there was no particular rhyme or reason to its use
there, it made the maps bright,
interesting, and imparted a lot more character. It's a style that was infrequently
used by WOTC for various maps but was one that I always liked. You can see it
also in the
CC map of the City of Greyhawk (to be found in the download library at the Profantasy
website).
That map again uses color just for the sake of color rather than additional coding
purposes.
With the standard CC idea of putting different building types
on different drawing layers I have expanded on that and done some fairly simple
color coding. The colors and layers correspond to the indicated color key
in the drawing. I have decided that I really prefer this kind of use of
color over house symbols for these Judges Guild city maps (though you could
probably mix the two with some
effort and possibly achieve even better results than I have). It helps to distinguish individual
buildings/areas in a crowded area, makes finding given types of buildings or occupants
easier, allows you to show some interior walls without any real added clutter,
and it also has the advantage of making it much faster to refresh since it doesn't have
all those symbols to redraw.
This map also has a layer named "Streetlights" which
should be hidden by
default. The positions of streetlights were marked on the original map and
the layer serves here to show where
the dark and dangerous areas are by showing the effective light radius of all the
streetlights.

Added a few buildings in the shipyard area that are
present on the really big foldout Bral map and the part of the steering vanes
visible from above. Part of my original plan for the map was to show more elevation
contours
than were on the original. I initially wasn't sure it
looked good anywhere but around the lake. I fixed that by changing to a
graduated brown color scheme instead of the green I'd originally chosen. The grass stands out more and
gives the feel that most of it is indeed rock. I also then didn't feel a need to try and draw
"streets" but let them be defined just by the positioning of the
buildings. Also, I finally did the underside map.

With Tegel Manor I first, rather foolishly, put the whole thing in
one file but with each floor on a separate layer - including one layer with side
elevations. I've long since redone that, including removing some of the "additions"
I'd made, but there is still some minor modification and interpretation to the original.
I finished it up with the appropriate labels from the original map. I also
tried something a little different for representing the doors and windows; something
closer to a color rendition of how the original JG maps handled doors and windows.
There's also a color code layer that visually sections the labeled areas alphabetically so
you can see at a glance where section 'E' is at so you can limit your hunt for room 'E-7'
to that area.
Tegel Village is a map of the area surrounding the manor. I tried
a few slightly different things on it because it actually had a few details that weren't
on the previous JG maps I did. It had "ridge lines" that sort of doubled
as contours, and in addition some actual cliffs. The original map simply did not do
a good job of clarifying whether the various parts were actual cliffs, ridges, mere
contour lines, etc. I made a superficial attempt to interpret what was supposed to be what.
There's probably a few REALLY small details that could be cleaned up although it does feel
like there's just something missing - something that needs to be changed but I'm not sure
what. Fewer trees maybe... and delete the "shadow" under them, then
sprinkle a bit more around to fill the blank spaces? Or maybe it's the original map
itself. These maps DO change rather dramatically when done up in color like
this. Details that were virtually invisible on a monochrome, sepia/tan map just POP
when you put things in color - one of the reasons I like this style. As it was
there was a lot of blank space once I'd laid out the basic vegetation so I added a few
scattered shrub and grass symbols to add visual interest.

One more old Judges Guild
map. This one was a simple
traced and measured translation from a scan of the original map. Very little modification from the
original. Unlike CSIO or Tegel, Thunderhold was done primarily by tracing
over a .bmp. It just wasn't as old-school in design (with all the
buildings oriented very orthogonally) so
it required slightly different technique. The Sunstone cave
entrance and escarpment don't look very good in this one but I don't have a reason to
embellish it anymore than you see here. The caves should really be well off the map
anyway (says the sensible DM and game designer in me). Their position just outside the city walls never made much sense. It's an old-school anachronism. I've included it here more out of a sense of
tradition/accuracy to the original than a belief that it ever really belonged there.

Firstly, I wrote a whole article devoted to issues of
calendars:
http://home.earthlink.net/~duanevp/dnd/calendars.htm Features these
very same calendars.
The first is the "official" Wilderlands calendar, which
has 18 months of 20 days in 5-day weeks, with a week-long "festival" at years
end. It also includes lunar phases for which I had to make a few assumptions, such
as that it is a 28 day cycle and that New Years Eve of 4432/4433 was a full moon.
The only difficulty with that is that in a 365-day year you can't get evenly divisible
lunar cycles so every year's calendar would have to be edited to arrange the lunar layer
properly. If you don't care for that idea you can either just turn off the
"Lunar" layer or edit it to fit your own assumptions (something Judges Guild
as well as myself would encourage you to do anyway!) Note also that this calendar
is very unusual in that it begins
on the first day of spring, not in the middle of winter.
The second is a compromise calendar closer to the Gregorian calendar of
the modern day western world. It has 12 months with varying periods of 30 and 31
days. January, April, July and October have 31 days, the rest have 30. That makes for a
364 day year, meaning that 7-day weeks and a variety of lunar cycles are evenly
divisible. If you feel you have to have 365 days then shoehorn a
"festival" day into it anywhere you like, or you can rearrange it to a slight
degree by adding another day to one of the months that only have 30. The advantages of this calendar are that it's very regular, predictable and enough like the real-world calendar not to cause confusion and
consternation among players.
Players, in my experience, just don't need or want a really weird
calendar. It also makes campaign time records easy to follow because there aren't
any days that fall outside of a month as happens with having lots of "festival"
or "holiday" weeks as filler trying to create a 365-day year. I'll
sometimes ask the players if they give a flying fish one way or the other about
the calendar. If they don't it'll be a toss-up between this and just using the real-world Gregorian calendar.
If they express any interest at all in a more
unique calendar, well obviously I've got several available and can whip up more
with little effort.
Next, the Forgotten Realms calendar. It may throw you
at first, but you don't
"read" this one left to right then top to bottom, The months are
arranged for you to read it top to bottom THEN
left to right. It was necessary to arrange it this way to get it to fit decently on
the screen. The lunar phases of the Realms are actually a little "iffy" to
represent on the calendar because the timing of the full moon does slide forward with each
cycle until every fourth year when the Shieldmeet is added to re-synchronize the lunar
calendar. It's otherwise 12 months of 30 days each in 10-day long weeks, with 5
added "holidays" for a typical 365-day year.
Greyhawk, the fourth calendar shown, is on a more straightforward,
clockwork basis every year for its lunar cycles. It has 12 months of 28 days in
7-day weeks, with four additional 7-day "festival" weeks adding another 28 days
for a 364-day year. At one point the .png had correct season colors, but the .fcw
itself
didn't. I'm not sure what I did, but I recall that I eventually did fix it. I must've been monkeying
around with it and saved a goofed up version.
Last is the Eberron calendar which is probably the simplest,
most clockwork game world
calendar you'll ever find. 12 months of 28 days in four 7-day weeks each, for a short 336-day year.
No festival weeks, no complex coordination (or lack thereof) between solar and
lunar calendars. Actually, the lunar layer of the .fcw for Eberron is hidden, left
for anyone to toy with if desired, but officially is irrelevant. Eberron has 12
moons and each month corresponds to the perigee of one of these moons, but nothing was
stated about the phases of these various moons, if any. I could
simply speculate (and if running my own campaign I would), but the typical wall
calendar format doesn't lend itself to charting more than a few moons at best,
so it seems pointless to bother detailing 12 - unless you HAVE to.

Daily Event Calendar

This is something that I've seen
people ask for a few times on message boards - a log of sorts to record daily
events in a campaign. One day after I'd seen yet another such request I threw
this together for grins. Dragon magazine many years ago published an
article that had several pages of this sort - monthly, daily, and (given the
rules at the time) even round- and TURN-based charts. The only one I ever
could see a use for (and in fact did use to good effect for quite some time) was the
one like this. It's intended for a Gregorian calendar, obviously, but can
be used for others as well up to 35 days. The smallest boxes are to write
in the number of the day in the month (in a Gregorian calendar, the weekday which the first
day of the month falls upon changes month-to-month and year-to-year). This sort of
thing is just mind-numbingly easy to put together in CC and can be adjusted to
specifically conform to any fantasy calendar. The alternative, of course,
is to simply use regular notebook paper or legal pads to keep the game records
- but where's the fun in that?

There isn't a lot of room to write on any given day, but
then it isn't for recording in-depth description either. It's unlikely
that EVERY day is going to packed with events that you'll need to record so you
can spill over and not feel confined to stay within the lines. There's
always always the simple legal pad if you need to wax poetic about game events. This is simply for
recording and coordinating basic game
events, PC movements and activities.